


piecemeal files

by silentwalrus



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-10 19:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13508010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: Contents: little chunks of stuff I write that don't really fit anywhere else. Pretty much just unrelated fragments. Sticking this on AO3, just in case tumblr goes tits-up in the near future





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, this is just a holding space for fragments! Lots of gaps, lots of cutoffs. Related segments are grouped between horizontal lines.

“I need somebody who speaks French, looks good in a tux and can punch through a cement wall,” Natasha announces, entering the Rogers-Barnes apartment via the fire escape window.

The Rogers-Barnes contingent, currently in some kind of… hug situation… on the couch, both look at her expectantly. “Fluent French,” she adds.

They keep looking at her.

“What, both of you?”

“Take your pick,” Barnes says. “I’m fluent in eight dialects, but you have to kickstart it and sometimes my brain damage likes to play language roulette. This one - “ he jerks a thumb at Steve “ - can speak on command, but only Parisian French from the forties.”

“Both of us can do the wall-punching,” Steve says.

“And it’s lady’s choice as to who looks better in a tux.”

* * *

 

(10 Things I Hate About You AU)

“Sup, bro,” Rumlow says. 

Bucky stares at him. “Bro,” he returns cautiously. 

“I need you to take out Wilson.” Rumlow says. “The white one, not the black one.”

“I am not doing anything illegal,” Bucky says immediately. 

“Yeah, man, parole sucks,” Rumlow says, nodding understandingly. Bucky, whose entire experience with the criminal element begins and ends with accidentally walking out of Build-A-Bear with an unpaid teddy when he was five, stares at him. 

Then again, Bucky’s henley was from Goodwill even before he got machine oil and fertilizer on it, and even if the neckline wasn’t distorted enough to show a good bit of his chest and shoulder it’s not like the scarring on his throat and jaw is easy to miss. He’s also the most built guy in the room-- pretty much any room-- because PT had been good for him and he sort of just hadn’t stopped, after. And he’s been told his resting face makes people wonder just how fast they would have to run to get away from him if he suddenly snapped and started disemboweling people with a Number 2 pencil. (Thanks, Tony.)  

So Bucky can see, sort of, maybe, how somebody who didn’t know him at all would sort of. Assume things. 

“Look,” Rumlow says. “You don’t have to fuck him or anything. Just take him out, dinner at McDonald’s or something. He’s gay as fuck, it’s not a problem-- listen, you gotta do this for me, man, nobody else would survive that crazy shrimp motherfucker and I need it to happen.”

“What the fuck,” Bucky says. 

“Two hundred bucks,” says Rumlow. 

Bucky immediately gets a hi-def crystal-clear mental snapshot of his bank account, followed rapidly by his monthly budgeting spreadsheets, utility bills, grant stipend and a mental post-it reminding him that the twins’ birthday is two weeks away and that he can’t get away with just cooking a nice birthday dinner when the birthday belongs to two fifteen year old girls. 

God, what do fifteen year olds even want? He and Becca hadn’t ever actually  _ been  _ fifteen, had they? Their mom liked to joke that the two of them had been born thirty, but he hand to god cannot even remember neither him nor Becca  _ actually _ being teenagers. Not like, teenage teenagers. Bucky had spent the first half of high school in science fairs and the second half in the hospital, and Becca had basically conned everybody in CNN’s local office into adopting her three weeks into freshman year. He’s pretty sure neither of them had any friends their own age from fifth grade until actual college. 

No, really,  _ what do fifteen year olds like? _ Is it-- Instagram? That’s-- a thing, right? A cool thing? Can Bucky get them two Instagrams? Maybe one? Can they share? How much would that even cost?

“Two fifty,” Rumlow says, completely misinterpreting the glazed bafflement in Bucky’s eyes, and Bucky’s almost tempted to stay quiet and see if he ups it some more before his anxiety kicks in and blurts “Done,” out of his mouth. 

“Cool, bruh,” Rumlow says, starting to stand. “I knew you were cool--”

“Up front,” Bucky says, and it’s honestly pure coincidence that his shoulder chooses to twinge at that exact moment in a way that makes him roll it, recalibrating the tensor cables in his arm with that creepy clicking noise he and Tony haven’t quite managed to get rid of yet. 

Rumlow freezes and sits back down. “Sure, man, let me just get my wallet,” he says, and he doesn’t move until Bucky nods. 

Huh. Maybe he’ll keep the clicking. Once he establishes what’s fucking causing it, anyway. 

  
  


“I’m looking for, uh, Wilson?” Bucky says. 

The girl snaps her gum. “The white one?”

“Uh… sure,” Bucky says. “The… white one.”

“Uh-huh,” the girl says disinterestedly, already turning to bellow, “HEY STEVE!”   
  


Then Wilson turns around, and Bucky trips, stumbles and crashes into a stack of easels. There’s a complicated moment where he thinks he’s saved himself by grabbing onto a big metal rack thing filled with drying paintbrushes, but it only ends up tipping over onto him. The whole mess goes down to the floor with an unholy clatter. 

“Hey, man, you okay?” 

Bucky gapes up at a  _ very _ familiar pale face, minus the usual bruises and plus a half dozen piercings and a few streaks of violently pink hair.  _ “Steve?”  _

Steve’s eyes go huge with shock.  _ “Bucky?” _

“Yeah!” Bucky struggles to get up, batting away a paintbrush that’s threatening to go up his nose. With Steve’s help they manage to get him sitting upright, at least, and staring at each other. “Steve!”

“Holy shit. Buck.”

“Holy shit  _ Steve.”  _ Bucky pretty sure his mouth is still hanging open. “Why’s your last name  _ Wilson?” _

Steve grins. “Got adopted.”

“Shit, that’s awesome! That’s awesome, right?”

Steve’s grin gets bigger. “Yeah, it’s awesome. They’re good people-- my brother goes here, actually-- you do too? Do you go here?”

“Yeah! Yeah, engineering, I’m doing my master’s in bioengineering,” Bucky babbles. “What do you-- art? You do art? Still do art, right?”

“That is why I’m in the art building,” Steve says, but he’s laughing, he looks happy. 

  
  
  
  


Bucky wordlessly turns his head to the side and lifts his hair up to show the thick surgical scarring on the base of his skull. “Brain surgery,” he says, then amends, “well, first car crash, then brain surgery. Neural implants. It’s how I can move this.” He wiggles his metal fingers. “It’s also why I’m in the labs all the time. I’m head guinea pig and second engineer on a next-gen prosthetics project and I’m basically doing my thesis on my own arm.”  

 

“Did my bachelor’s in MechE.”

  
  


Fury stares at him for a long, long time. “What the fuck happened to you, son?”

Bucky smiles beatifically. “Love, sir.”

* * *

It starts with Bucky being an idiot of unprecedented magnitudes. He’d been bored, and bored of being bored, so he started cleaning up their little two-story brownstone, then changing things around, then finally renovating the top floor except “renovating the top floor” turned into “building a third story”. It’s fine. It’s great. He learns a lot about lumber grades and load-bearing structures and city permits and their enclosed rooftop gazebo thing is gonna be  _ beautiful,  _ okay, and it doesn’t matter how many times he hits his thumb with his hammer because it’s metal and just bounces off anyway. 

And everything's going great - or at least with all catastrophes relatively minimal - when Bucky trips headfirst into sexual awakening at the age of probably-thirty-nine via renovation hardware malfunction.

It’s a Tuesday morning. He’s using the nailgun and he’s having fun with it. It requires a long-ass extension cord, so Bucky’s trailing bright orange wiring as he goes. The enclosed gazebo situation he's building  _ may  _ have been originally designed to be a shady-bower type thing meant to be placed in the middle of a field, but he’d liked the design so much he went through the hell of modifications anyway. The point is, there are eight columns around the central space, which currently sports a hole serving as Bucky’s trapdoor back into their actual house.

Bucky has nobody to blame but himself where he gets so absorbed in using the nailgun that he doesn’t realize his extension cord is now tangled around more than three columns. 

  
  


“Why in god’s name do I have a stiffy,” Bucky says aloud. 

 

 

Bucky buys the rope, because Steve has some kind of condition that prevents him from accessing common sense whenever he has to buy something. The shop is in Park Slope, and the tattooed salesgirl assures him it’s 100% vegan and organic and paraben gluten carcinogen free, which, okay, but Bucky would’ve been happy with “won’t give you a rash, probably”. It’s also dyed a soft petal pink. The salesgirl offered him black and red, too, which was probably a reasonable enough guess given his boots and motorcycle jacket, but there’s something about the pink that makes him go a kind of warm inside, just looking at it.

He takes it home and throws it in the washing machine with the rest of the colors, and that’s enough to make him forget about it until Steve pulls it out from their pile of clean underpants.

* * *

Bucky loved being tied up, back before the war. Steve would trap his wrists with a belt or a tie, anchor him to the bed or keep him still at the table, and sometimes if Bucky was very good and got very lucky Steve would loop a belt around his neck and leave it there. He could be still on his own, sure-- he’d made his damn army career on it-- but for some reason there was something about having no choice about it that bypassed most of his defenses and went straight to the spine.

Bucky shivers. He doesn’t spend too long in front of the mirror these days, not longer than it takes to shave, really, but he-- remembers being vain, being careful, knowing he was handsome and taking his time to make himself even more so. 

Bucky looks in the mirror now. He doesn’t really look the same as before, and not even in a way that can be excused by age. He stands differently, his face moves differently, and all of that is  _ without _ the hair and the bulk and oh, right, yeah, the metal fucking arm. 

Bucky runs his flesh hand up his stomach and chest, scratching automatically at the chest hair before letting his palm rest at the base of his throat. Bucky at twenty had been sleek and lean, well groomed and cocky and proud of it; a collar had suited him, even when it had been cheap black belt leather. He’d felt favored, loved-- spoiled, even, and he’d looked it, too, he knew, sprawled on their cheap bed with its cheap sheets and rich with all of Steve’s attention on him. He’d looked good. He’d felt better. 

Bucky at ninety-nine is now nearly three hundred pounds of mad science and muscle. He doesn’t really relax much and he knows he still moves like a carnivorous bulldozer whenever he stops paying attention. Collaring that-- well, let’s just say putting a collar on a nice purebred house dog goes a little differently from putting one on a Rottweiler that’s just barely stopped foaming.  

Bucky squeezes at his throat, just a little, then lets his hand drop. 

* * *

 

The now-iconic footage of Iron Man firing his repulsors at Captain America’s shield and using it as a redirect to take out six Chitauri in a moment of perfect teamwork and flawless cohesion is playing again. It looks great on TV and the clip has over nine million hits on YouTube, but what actually happened is that Tony swung around, turned his fire on Steve, Steve raised his shield to cover himself - the cameras entirely failed to capture him bellowing “STARK WHAT THE FUCK” as he tilted the shield to turn the reflected beam away from Iron Man - and it just happened to knock over as many aliens as it did without cooking one or both of them in their suits.  

After Bucky watched all the available Battle of Manhattan footage, he’d rested his forehead on the kitchen table for a long five minutes. “It honestly wasn’t that bad,” Steve tried to tell him.

“Shut the fuck up, Steve,” Bucky said.

“No, honestly, after Tony flew the nuke through the wormhole - ”

“Do you even hear what’s coming out of your mouth?” Bucky demanded, sitting up, eyes wild. “How the fuck are you doing it?  _Where do you keep finding people crazier than you?”_

“Are you including yourself in this category?”

* * *

 “The world may be ready for a queer Captain America,” Bucky says wearily, “but it is not ready for Captain America’s extremely fucked-up homicidal  _‘boyfriend’._ And the boyfriend,” Bucky continues threateningly when Steve opens his mouth, “Is not fucking ready for the fucking security nightmare that is stepping out to the closet or whatever they call it in the twenty-first  _fucking_  century.”

Steve shuts his mouth, looks incredibly mulish for a second, then deflates all at once, curling his arm around his knees. He thunks his forehead against the side of the tub. “Sorry.”

Bucky lifts his pruny flesh hand out of the water and puts it in Steve’s hair, watching the suds drip down his collar as he takes another drag on the cigarette. “What’s that they say,” Bucky says, blowing the smoke out the window. “You gotta do you. Something like that. And I gotta do me.”

”Thought that was my job,” Steve halfheartedly tells his own knees, and Bucky rubs absently at Steve’s nape but neither of them bother to move.  

“You really are sorry,” Bucky muses a few minutes later. “You’d have suggested we fuck in the tub by now with your butter-wouldn’t-melt face on otherwise.”

Steve doesn’t lift his head but Bucky can hear his grin. “Why, you wanna?”

“You feel like flooding the downstairs neighbors, Rogers?”

“They’ll survive.”

Bucky squeezes Steve’s nape and shakes him a little. “What day is it, Rogers?”

Steve groans. “Thursday.”

“That’s right. That means my week of nice boring vanilla sex isn’t over yet, and that means until midnight on Sunday you’re going to keep your trap shut about whatever the fuck the internet’s told you to try with your dick next–”

“Fuck you, you  _loved_  the thing with the belt - ”

* * *

“I’m going to desecrate his grave,” Barnes said calmly. “Ideally I would have liked to piss on his corpse, but not even that is worth digging up the carcass. Also, does anybody know where Arnim Zola is buried?”

“Under forty yards of munitions bunker rubble,” Steve said.  

Barnes thought about it. “Acceptable. Pierce?”

Natasha grimaced. “They wanted to put him in Arlington–”

“–but given the fact that he’s the biggest fucking traitor to his country since Benedict fucking Arnold–” Steve interjected.

“– they buried him in his family plot instead. Glenwood Cemetery.”

Sam turned his phone to them. “About an hour from here, if google’s right about traffic.”

It took more like ninety minutes, but that was because, as flying Sam most eloquently described it, DC traffic was its own super special individual circle of hell.  

Pierce’s grave was large and tastefully elaborate, the final resting place of a successful politician. The headstone was grey marble slab,  _Alexander Michael Pierce_  written across it in engraved gold script.  _1948-2014._  There were no flowers.

“Want me to draw a dick on it?” Steve offered.

Barnes looked at the Sharpie in his hand, then at the gravestone, then at his metal arm, then back at the gravestone. He threw the Sharpie over his shoulder and crouched down, bracing his flesh hand on the head of the tombstone.

“What are you– wow,” Steve said, as the shriek of Barnes’ metal finger carving into the marble split the air. “That’s… wow.”

“Marker washes off,” Barnes grunted, carving in another letter. “Adamantium is forever.”

“I don’t know whether to be impressed or… no, I’m definitely impressed,” Sam said. “A little scared, not gonna lie, but definitely impressed.”

Barnes sat back. “There,” he said, wiping rock dust off his finger. “Now it’s accurate.”

 _Alexander Michael Pierce,_ the gravestone now read, with NAZI TRAITOR ASSHOLE spelled out below in huge, mathematically perfect capitals right below. Barnes blew some more rock dust out of the letters and nodded in satisfaction.  

“That’s about right,” Steve said critically, regarding it with hands on his hips. “You sure you don’t want me to add a dick on there? Because I could absolutely–”

“Steve,” Bucky said, standing up, “shut up for a second,” and then he grabbed Steve by the neck, kissed him on the mouth and dipped him backwards like that one picture of the sailor he’d seen from VE day.

“Bucky!” Steve exclaimed, wrenching his mouth away. “Not in a cemetery, oh my gmmmphhh–”

“Really?” Sam said behind them. “Are you for god damn serious right now?”

“Bucky,” Steve gasped, when Bucky came up for air.  “Bucky, we are literally over Pierce’s dead rotting body.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chunks of a story whose idea eventually mutated into the Asgardian Woo Woo magic WIP. super disjointed, as always 
> 
> CW: some violence and gore, not too explicit

 

The HYDRA base was on the outskirts of some town in Colorado, about an hour’s drive south of Aspen. It was primarily a research outpost-- well, research to some, highly illegal medical torture to others-- which was how it had gotten away with staying off their radar this long. They tended to hit the more obscure facilities as Bucky remembered them, and three days ago he’d grimaced at the kitchen table and bit out a set of coordinates. 

Natasha met them at the Colorado border-- just waiting at a rest stop like she’d sprouted there, what the fuck-- and Sam had driven them to their destination. It was a pretty easy op for the first forty minutes: Sam held the perimeter while Steve and Bucky took point and Natasha ran data cleanup after. 

It’s around minute forty-one that things go to shit. 

“Widow, we’ve got unidentified tech in lab three,” Cap says, comms clicking on. “Looks Asgardian. I want your second opinion before we try anything.”

  
  
  
  


Steve explodes out from behind a fallen cabinet with a noise like a wildcat snarling into a bass amplifier. He tackles the lab coat guy, all four limbs extended, teeth bared, and hits him so hard the metal table crumples beneath them. The lab coat guy has time to give one very desperate, very short little shriek. 

Sam leaves him to it and checks the room, making sure it’s clear. Bucky is struggling his way up from beneath some more cabinets; Natasha is crouched on the floor across the room, also looking around. Sam registers some weird, wet-sounding noises coming from the broken table and turns back to Steve. “Cap? You okay there?”

Steve rears up from the wreckage, swinging his head around to look at Sam, and Sam’s pistol goes up on automatic. 

Steve cocks his head. His stare is flat and blank, pupils blown. His whole mouth, chin, and front are smeared with blood. 

“Steve,” Sam says very calmly, “Please tell me you didn’t just take that dude’s throat out with your teeth.”

Steve stands in one fluid motion, and Sam barely has time to track with his pistol before Steve’s  _ right _ in front of him, moving with the jerky, stop-motion fluidity of a feral predator. “Widow,” Sam says, keeping his tone very calm as Steve pushes his gun aside, crowding in close and ducking down a little so he can  _ rub his bloody face  _ on  _ Sam’s shoulder, _ what the  _ fuck, _ the Asgardian tech  _ definitely did something. _ “Widow, I need a little fuckin’ help here--”

There’s a short, sharp clatter behind Steve, and Sam catches a flash of red moving: Natasha’s climbed up onto the tallest shelf in the room, her back to the wall, crouched down. Her eyes gleam from behind her hair.   

“Oh fuck,” Sam says, because if it hit Natasha and it’s affecting Steve, then Bucky fuckin’ Barnes has got it too, and Sam does  _ not _ want to see what happens when the Winter Soldier gets a taste of something that makes Captain America go Actual Cannibal on a HYDRA guy’s ass.

As if on cue, there’s a little grunt from Bucky’ last known location. Steve’s head whips around. Sam doesn’t even have time to swear before Steve’s across the room in two bounds, tackling a woozy-looking Bucky down behind the fallen cabinets. They go down in a huge clatter, and Sam hears Bucky make a high-pitched noise of surprise before that gets cut off, too. 

Sam runs to them just in time to see them roll under a table, and thank god, jesus christ, he recognizes that grunting and flailing from the couple of times he got to witness supersoldiers roughhousing in the living room like a couple of twelve-year-old boys. The only difference is this time Steve is very obviously trying to bite Bucky somewhere around his neck. 

“JB?” Sam tries, without any real hope. Bucky just keeps on trying to buck Steve off himself with single-minded determination. “Okay, I’ll leave you to it,” Sam says, turning around, and great, Natasha’s gone. 

Then another guy in a lab coat falls through the open door. He’s missing most of his throat. “Nevermind,” Sam mutters, as Natasha strolls back in, picking her way delicately around the corpse. “Widow?” Sam tries. “Natasha?”

She stops moving and looks at him, but the way she’s holding her head is-- strange, in a way Sam can’t really quantify. She looks pretty normal otherwise, but it’s enough that Sam can tell she’s gone feral too. That, and the fact that her little hands are literally dripping blood. 

But she’s not attacking him. Neither is Steve, although he’s still busy wrestling Bucky for no coherent reason Sam can pick out. They recognize him, at least. Sam really, really hopes it’ll last.  

“Okay,” he says, deciding this is above and beyond grounds for mission abort. “We’re getting out of here. Natasha, can you understand me? At all?”

Natasha cocks her head at him. “That’s a no,” Sam sighs. 

First things first: he goes to the door and shuts it, dragging one of the metal tables over to serve as a temporary barricade. Natasha watches him for a few moments, then clearly gets bored and wanders over to where Steve and Bucky have gone suspiciously quiet. Whatever she sees down there makes her huff a little in surprise and hop up onto a cabinet, looking way too interested in whatever the hell they’re doing.   

Sam decides he can enjoy a few more minutes of ignorant bliss and goes looking for the Asgardian… thing. He finds it on the floor in the middle of the room; it’s a little thing, just about as big as his palm, a dull grey ball wrapped up in several curly strands of shiny brass metal. It’s not glowing or moving or anything, but Sam knows what Steve meant when he said it looked alien. 

Sam draws his telescoping baton, extends it and pokes the magic ball with the tip. When it does absolutely nothing, Sam roots around the lab until he finds a padded metal case full of creepy-looking syringes. He dumps those and ushers the evil little thing into it with his baton, praying to little baby Jesus that it won’t have some kind of horrible reaction to steel or plastic or whatever the hell else it might be touching. Leaving it behind isn’t an option, not when it has two Avengers ripping people’s throats out. 

He tapes the case shut with his ever-present roll of duct tape and considers securing it to his back before deciding that would be super stupid and settling on carrying it instead. He spots Steve’s shield as he’s standing up, lying upside down 

  
  
  
  


Steve vaults upright, darting over to Sam, then darting back to haul up a very disheveled Bucky. Steve’s pink-cheeked and bright-eyed; he’s wiped most of the blood off his face, which is good, except he wiped it all on Bucky, who looks like he got dragged backwards through a wheat thresher. All his hair is loose, some of the straps have popped on his tac gear and there’s a distinctly human bite mark branded squarely across his right cheekbone. 

Sam turns to glare at Steve. “Really?” he says. “Really, Steve? Don’t give me that look, you  _ bit him on his face _ . Jesus. JB, you okay, man?”

Bucky blinks at him with an expression of good-natured incomprehension. Sam’s abruptly reminded of his cousin Sheila’s dog, which is two hundred pounds of sweet-natured Husky mix that nevertheless looks like it eats other dogs for breakfast, presumably before starting in on people. 

“JB?” Sam says. “You good to walk, man? We gotta get out of here.” 

Steve, already literally bouncing on his toes, goes completely nuts at the word  _ out _ , bounding over and body-checking the table away from the door. Bucky winces at the crash but trots after him, Natasha slinking along behind, and it’s not like Sam has a choice after that, does he.

  
  


“Well, they’ve been murdering anyone who isn’t me,” Sam says. “And I mean literal, teeth-in-throat murdering. So far that’s been only HYDRA guys, but I really don’t want to test it with innocent bystanders.”

"Great," Hill says.

 

Behind him, Steve pins Bucky to the seat with a hand on his forehead and starts licking the arterial spray off his face. 

“Don’t you dare,” Sam swears. Natasha turns wounded eyes on him. “Steve’s a supersoldier, Tasha, I don’t care if he licks nuclear waste or subway poles, you ain’t got what he’s got and that’s a fuckin’ biohazard. No. No way in hell.”

Natasha narrows her eyes.  _ “No,” _ Sam tells her. “C’mon. You don’t want bad guy blood in your mouth. It can’t possibly taste good, Steve’s just nasty.”

 

 

“You fucking asked for it,” Sam swears, and snatches up the magazine from the couch side table. 

It takes nearly ten minutes of swearing, shoving and swatting with the magazine to get Steve the hell off of JB. Natasha’s on top of Sam’s bookshelf, clearly enjoying the show, and Bucky is hiding behind Sam.

 

Steve is crouched in the living room corner, watching the rolled-up magazine with narrowed eyes. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cleaning out more piecemeal chunks from old files, doop de doo

For every one thing history and the media get right about Steve, there’s fifty they get wrong and another five hundred they could not even possibly imagine to be wrong about. Among those things are Steve’s trap playlists, his incredibly militant opinions on postmodernist architecture, and the fact that he, Captain America, has the kind of sex toy collection usually only found in very upscale brothels in world-famous red light districts.

“Uh,” Bucky says, staring down into the very tasteful cloth-lined wicker basket. He’s organizing their closet because Steve sure as shit won’t do it, and this was sitting innocently in the corner next to Steve’s combat boots and Bucky’s extra boxes of ammo. Bucky, because he's not a depraved animal, had foolishly thought it was for socks or something. “Steve?”

“What?” Steve calls back from the kitchen. Bucky can’t actually make himself look away from the basket. There are-- Bucky knows what a dildo looks like, okay, it’s just he’s never seen any that shape, or that  _ color _ , or Jesus Christ,  _ that size _ \--

“Oh, those,” Steve says over his shoulder, drying his hands on a dishcloth. “Just leave them in the closet, the only other place I’d put them is in the bathroom cabinet and it’s too much of a hassle to grab them from there.” 

“These are,” Bucky says carefully, “Yours?”

“No, Buck, I keep other people’s sex toys in my bedroom closet,” Steve says dryly. “Of course they’re mine.”

“You went out and bought--” Bucky makes a small, vaguely desperate gesture, “--all of this?”

“Nah, only four of ‘em,” Steve says, and he’s definitely grinning, Bucky can hear it. “The rest of it is-- well, remember I told you I slept with Thor?” Bucky nods dumbly. “Well, him and Jane, they gave me all this as a birthday present. Sort of like a gift basket, y’know? They tried a lot of stuff when Thor was on Earth. These were his favorites.”

Bucky wordlessly holds up nine inches of weirdly curved, strangely heavy neon purple rubber and silicone. 

“That’s The Devastator,” Steve says helpfully. Bucky can  _ hear _ the capital letters. “ _ My _ favorite, personally.”  

“Your favorite,” Bucky echoes faintly. It looks like something out of an alien torture chamber. It has  _ racing stripes. _

“Yep. Dual motor, twelve vibration settings," Steve reports cheerfully. "Best one. Out of what I’ve tried, anyway. Haven’t had a go at anything still in the packaging.”

Bucky tilts the basket to look at the items still in their packaging. They are without a doubt all on the smaller end of the spectrum. He is, upon reflection, not even a little bit surprised. 

“You should try some,” Steve says encouragingly. “They’re nice. You’ll have fun.”

“You’re telling me to try out the sex toys gifted to you by your alien warrior fuck buddy,” Bucky says flatly. 

“And his girlfriend,” Steve says, unperturbed. 

"I'd say the twenty-first century fucked you up, except I knew you were like this before. Mary and Joseph, sweetheart."

Steve just looks infuriatingly smug. "Don't knock it 'til you try it."

Bucky stares doubtfully at the basket, then carefully extracts one of the less horrifying options. It’s a pretty standard phallic shape, except rendered in soft-looking... plastic… jello… stuff. It’s pastel pink and has flowers patterned on the base. The package reads, in rounded, cutesy-looking type,  _ My Happy Valentine Sweet Satisfaction Vibrating Love Noodle FOR HER! _

Bucky realizes he’s reading it in Japanese, then realizes what he  _ actually _ read and drops it into the basket. “Maybe--uh--later.”

“Whatever you like,” Steve says, bending down to give Bucky a short kiss. He smells like dish soap; his hand is still damp when it curves around Bucky’s nape. 

“Whatever I like,” Bucky echoes.

  
He can’t remember  _ everything _ they did, but he remembers most, and even he can recognize that their sex life was kind of… adventurous. They didn’t have any of these fancy new toys, sure, but that was no obstacle to a creative thinker, and Steve could think very creatively indeed. From what Bucky has gathered, their sexual exploration had followed a pretty standard script; Steve would say  _ what happens if I do this? _ and Bucky would say  _ ah ah aaah please oh god oh god Steve please. _


End file.
